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Posts Tagged: Primary Systems Inc.

The $180,000 robbery took the building security and maintenance system installer Primary Systems Inc. by complete surprise. More than two-dozen people helped to steal funds from the company’s coffers in an overnight heist in May 2012, but none of the perpetrators were ever caught on video. Rather, a single virus-laden email that an employee clicked on let the attackers open a digital backdoor, exposing security weaknesses that unfortunately persist between many banks and their corporate customers.

The St. Louis, Missouri-based firm first learned that things weren’t quite right on Wednesday, May 30, 2012, when the company’s payroll manager logged into her account at the local bank and discovered that an oversized payroll batch for approximately $180,000 had been sent through late Tuesday evening.

The money had been pushed out of Primary Systems’ bank accounts in amounts between $5,000 and $9,000 to 26 individuals throughout the United States who had no prior interaction with the firm, and who had been added to the firm’s payroll that very same day. The 26 were “money mules,” willing or unwitting participants who are hired through work-at-home job schemes to help cyber thieves move money abroad. Most of the mules hired in this attack were instructed to send the company’s funds to recipients in Ukraine.

“The payroll manager contacted me at 8:00 a.m. that day to ask if I’d authorized the payroll batch, and I said no, it must have been a bank error,” said Jim Faber, Primary Systems’ chief financial officer. “I called the bank and said they said no, they did not make an error. That was a helluva wake-up call.”

The company’s financial institution, St. Louis-based Enterprise Bank & Trust, declined to comment. But of course, mistakes were made all around. Primary Systems’ employees failed to be wary of virus-laden email attachments, and relied too heavily on its firewalls and antivirus software to block attacks. The bank failed to bat an eyelash before processing a $180,000 transfer marked as “payroll” on a Tuesday, even though the company has always processed its payroll batch on Friday mornings. It also failed to flag as strange the overnight addition to Primary’s payroll of 26 new employees located in nearly as many states, even though almost all of the victim firm’s legitimate employees are based in Missouri.

The only parties to this crime who didn’t make missteps were the thieves. According to Faber, investigators believe the crooks cased the joint virtually before launching the heist, which came in just below the $200,000 threshold that would have prompted the bank to obtain verbal permission from Primary Systems for the transfer.

“If it was over $200k, [the bank] wouldn’t have allowed the transfer to happen without confirming it with us,” Faber said. “But this just flew right under that kickout. Our payroll is a lot less than that. This was six times our normal payroll and was in mid-week.”